Automatic accents basing on meter
I know that playback is secondary in the "to do" list for this project, but I see that even arpeggios work so I think that this is also a basic thing that should be implemented: automatic accents on notes basing on the selected meter.
So if you have pp, the first notes in the first beat instead of having 33/127 dynamic, could have something like 50/127. And the third beat could have something like 40/127.
It's also pretty easy to implement, I think.
This is pretty important IMO compared to other minor things because if all the notes have the same dynamic value a composition can sound totally different from what you would actually expect. As an example: even if sFz doesn't work, I can just edit the note myself. But editing every first beat is a pain, instead, this is why I ask for this feature.
Comments
Fwiw, I am pret sure a plugin could be written do to do that pretty easily...
But I'd disagree as to the importance of this, even compared to other playback issues. In any event, it definitely should not be done by default - it would make playback worse, not better, to my tastes. Accenting the first sixteenth of beat isn't really something everyone does or should do; it is very much style and player specific. I guess it might be common in marching band music, maybe some other styles? Whereas a number of other things that don't playback but should are true for everyone, all styles (eg, a slur is always a slur, crescendos are always crescendos, glissandos are always glissandos, an accent always an accent). In fact, I'd suggest that if you really want this effect, you should add accents at least to the first few, then write "simile", or many human players would be trying very are *not* to accent the beats. Then you could also add accents to the rest but mark them invisible, and then hope that accent playback happens on the next version..
Finale handles this sort of thing with a separate "human playback" layer that goes through the score making those kind of adjustments every time you hit the play button (well, that's how it worked in 2008, anyhow), with a dialog that lets you select which style you want applied and to some exent what the parameters of that style should be. Some styles might add this accent, others might not. That sort of thing would be a nice addition to MuseScore as well, although elsewhere I,be suggested it might be better made as a separate program.
I can understand the suggestion by 255, since one of my scores is in 12/8 time, but if I had written it in a very fast 3/4 or 3/8, it would probably have sounded no different when played back by the computer. Even if I had written the piece in 4/4 time with triplets throughout, I would still have had to put in some accents manually, as the nature of the piece demands the largest stress on beat one, some, but a bit less, on beat four, even less on beat 7, etc.
However, even if MuseScore could accent the correct beats automatically, I doubt if even the best computer and software will ever render music the way a human being would play it on an acoustic instrument (except, of course, in an audio recording). After all, so much depends on the individual performer's interpretation of the score. The music has to be felt, not just read.